Wednesday, September 15, 2010

WD World Edition My Book as NAS

The World Edition My Books function as Network-attached storage (NAS), by way of an Ethernet interface. They also feature an extra USB host port to allow an additional USB drive to be daisychained. Data on first generation (Blue Rings) My Book World is accessed as CIFS/SMB shared folders. The second generation (White Lights) expands the access choices to include NFS, FTP, an iTunes server, and a Twonky media server.

It has the same basic case design as the Premium Edition drives, including the capacity gauge, except the color of the World Edition is white. It also has the same Morse codeventilation as the other editions.

Internals

Controller board for My Book World Edition

This drive runs BusyBox on Linux on an Oxford Semiconductor 0XE800 ARM chip which has the ARM926EJ-S core. In addition it uses aVIA Cicada Simpliphy vt6122 Gigabit Ethernet chipset, and a Hynix 32 Mbit DDR Synchronous DRAM chip. The webserver is the mini_httpd server, although thought to be Lighttpd. The drives of the World Edition are xfs formatted, which means that the drive can be mounted as a standard drive from within Linux if removed from the casing and installed in a normal PC.

The disk filesystems are also known to exist in a format created by linux multiple devices driver (Mdadm) which ultimately wraps an ext3 partition with some metadata that allows the inquiry of the position of the drive in a RAID set. Unfortunately, this makes mounting the drives outside of the enclosure a bit more complicated, it also requires a machine with a flavor of the Linux operating system. For example, the best way to mount the drives on a Linux flavored operating system after they have been removed from the enclosure is to use the following set of commands for mirrored RAID 1 disks.

$ sudo modprobe md

$ sudo mknod /dev/md4 b 9 4

$ sudo apt-get install mdadm

$ sudo mdadm --assemble /dev/md4 /dev/sdb4

$ sudo mkdir /media/xyz

edia/xyz
$ sudo chmod -R 777 /me

$ sudo mount /dev/md4 /

mdia/xyz

Note that the above set of commands assume that your drives appear as /dev/sdb to linux. You can use a utility like gparted to determine which paths are relevant for your setup.

And alternately you can use this command set for mounting a multidisk spanning RAID 0 set in linux:

$ sudo modprobe md

$ sudo mknod /dev/md4 b 9 4

$ sudo apt-get install mdadm

$ mdadm -Cv /dev/md4 -l0 -n2 -c64 /dev/sdb4 /dev/sdc4

$ sudo mkdir /media/xyz

edia/xyz
$ sudo chmod -R 777 /me

$ sudo mount /dev/md4 /

mdia/xyz

Note that the above set of commands assume that your drives appear as /dev/sda and /dev/sdb to linux. Again, you can use a utility like gparted to determine which paths are relevant for your setup.

Extending capabilities

The device can be 'unlocked' and accessed via SSH terminal (newer versions of WDH1NC10000 do not need to be "unlocked": MBWE SSH Access), meaning that the WD MioNetjava-based software can be disabled so the device can be run with an unrestricted Linux OS,[9] at the cost of voiding the warranty.[10] The unlocking makes it possible to install other software on MyBook (i.e. run a different webserver or an ftp server (such as vsftpd) on it, use NFS for mounting shared directories natively from Unix, or even install a bitTorrent client such as rTorrent,[11] etc.) Further information on unlocking the device and downloads you are going to need can be found here.